Professor Casserly’s Lessons Outline a Course for Life

The former N.F.L. executive Charley Casserly teaching a sport management seminar at George Mason University.Credit
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

FAIRFAX, Va. — On a typical Monday evening, Charley Casserly spends three hours at George Mason University in Enterprise Hall, Room 176.

The students call him Professor Casserly.

He spent more than 30 years in football, coaching and scouting and eventually running two N.F.L. teams, the Redskins and the Texans. But Casserly started as a teacher, and only now, after returning from the film room to the classroom, did he realize that part of him never really left. He still liked grading papers as much as he liked grading players.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a teacher,” Casserly, 59, said.

He stands at the front of the room, arms crossed, slacks pressed, shirt crisp. He runs a class discussion, breezes through a PowerPoint presentation.

The course is SM 475, a sport management professional-development seminar for undergraduates, taught by Casserly and Bob Baker, head of the department.

“We’re talking fundamentals,” Casserly, forever the football coach, tells the class. “You’re going to use the fundamentals of this for the rest of your life.”

Before he went into football, Casserly worked at Springfield College and two high schools, all in Massachusetts, where he taught physical education and biology, and served as a guidance counselor, athletic director and football coach. He describes his early teaching style as “a little bit of read the book at 7 and teach it at 8.”

He took his first N.F.L. job in 1977, an internship with the Redskins, and stayed in the league until May 2006, when he resigned as general manager after a 2-14 season with the Houston Texans. His experience in between is tailored to this course, which Casserly summarizes in eight words — how to get a job and keep one — foreign to those accustomed to life in the N.F.L.

How did he end up here? He put together a bucket list of everything he wanted to do after football. The first two items: work in television and teach at the college level.

Casserly crossed both off quickly. The day after he resigned, CBS called about an analyst position. He accepted. After one year there, he started calling colleges near his home in Washington. This resulted in two positions, a graduate course at Georgetown last fall and the undergraduate class at George Mason this spring.

There he joined a rapidly growing sport management program, with a 70 percent increase in students taking department classes in the last year.

“I knew right away he would be the perfect fit,” Baker said. “I compare the kind of positive attention from having Charley to the attention from when George Mason made the Final Four.”

The teacher lived everything he teaches.

FINDING A JOB Casserly sent letters to 28 N.F.L. teams, and 22 responded.

PAYING DUES He started with the Redskins as an unpaid intern. Casserly said he lived in a Y.M.C.A. for $8 a night — “more bugs than people”— and subsisted on jars of peanut-butter-and-jelly swirl.

IMPRESSING BOSSES When George Allen, then the Redskins’ coach, hired Casserly, he wanted someone who would open and close the office and work more than anybody else. Casserly said he took this literally.

FINDING MENTORS Casserly still remembers a Mr. Carlson at Springfield College, who taught him how to write; Sister Alice Kinney at Springfield’s Cathedral High School, who insisted he clean his desk each Friday; George McElwreath, his PeeWee football coach; and Allen, Bobby Beathard and Joe Gibbs in the N.F.L.

MOVING UP Casserly volunteered to run the Redskins’ training camp in 1983. Soon after, he revived the team’s internship program, hiring the kinds of students who now sit in his classroom and take notes. His first intern? Steve Spagnuolo, now the Giants’ defensive coordinator.

Like Casserly, Spagnuolo performed typical intern duties. He ran errands, chauffeured players to and from the airport, stocked the refrigerator in the coaches’ room. Casserly also assigned Spagnuolo to write two manuals, one for drills at the scouting combine and one for future interns.

“Cleaning out my bookshelves, I saw that manual the other day,” Spagnuolo said. “I thought of Charley. Deep down, he’s always been an educator.”

All the interns after Spagnuolo read the manual and performed the menial tasks. Casserly listed dozens of former interns who are coaches, scouts and executives all over the country.

At some point, Casserly said, they all wondered what making coffee had to do with making it in the N.F.L. Same as his current students.

“What I would tell them is this: Honestly, nothing,” Casserly said. “But you wouldn’t be here if we didn’t need somebody to do these things. The experience, believe it or not, is invaluable.”

As interns left the Redskins, Casserly helped them find jobs. Spagnuolo said Casserly made several calls on his behalf. The same with Rob Kisiel, who now runs a scouting service for N.F.L. teams.

When they worked in Houston, Kisiel said, several Texans employees on the business side had never worked in football. Casserly broke the game down for them.

“He’s got an educator’s way about him,” Kisiel said.

Casserly said he did not feel the urge to return to football. He recently added a job with the NFL Network to his CBS analyst duties. He spends Tuesdays at the headquarters for NFL Films near Philadelphia, evaluating players, grading still.

He has a house in Georgetown, season tickets to the Nationals and a sports-memorabilia collection that includes an autographed photograph of Don Larsen, the Yankees pitcher, to whom Casserly once delivered newspapers in New Jersey.

Of the criticism he received for his work with the Texans, Casserly repeated something the Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke once told him: “Criticism is like being in the rain. Once you’re wet, what’s another drop?”

Casserly said: “I don’t regret anything. I don’t look back on it. I’m very happy what I’m doing, and that’s not some stock answer. That’s how I really feel.”

The teacher is still teaching. He meets with students individually to give assignments. The student who wants to be a pitching coach must turn in a workout schedule for a mock pitching staff. The student who wants to be an agent must interview one.

They are landing internships with teams and leagues, even full-time jobs. They thank Professor Casserly, in part.

“I never got tired in the N.F.L.,” he said. “But what this does mentally is it energizes you. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is where I’m supposed to be.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page SP6 of the New York edition with the headline: Professor Casserly’s Lessons Outline a Course for Life . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe